Maia Gattás Vargas
Maia Gattás Vargas is a visual artist, audiovisual creator, university professor, and researcher.
She holds a PhD in Arts, specialized in Latin American Contemporary Art (UNLP). She graduated with a degree in communication sciences and as a secondary and tertiary education professor (UBA). She works as a postdoctoral fellow at CONICET and as a professor of Media and Culture Theories at UBA. In 2022, she published her first book Diario de exploración al territorio del color, edited by the Biblioteca Popular Astra de Comodoro Rivadavia, as part of its Contemporary Art Imai collection. Her first feature-length documentary Viento del este premiered nationally in August 2023 at the Doc Buenos Aires Festival and internationally at the Jihlava IDFF in the Czech Republic, where it won the Original Approach Award. Her artistic work explores the relationships between images, science, landscape, nature, and colonial history. She creates archival installations combining video, collage, photographs, documents, and writing.
Art & Spatial Praxis – Maia Gattás and Francisca Khamis Giacoman met in the West Bank in 2019. Francisca was conducting a residency in Birzeit, and Maia was traveling to film scenes for her documentary "Viento del Este" (2023). They have committed to exchanging letters to engage in a dialogue about various memories related to water in the occupied territory of Palestine.